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6/30/2025, 8:47:36 AM
>>28486375
I've been looking into this myself. The conclusion I came to is that it's best to just keep my normal "dumb" non-touchscreen head unit for driving speakers and receiving radio and bluetooth. For the "smart" part, I idea is to mount an AliExpress touchscreen monitor somewhere and connect it to an Alder Lake mini-pc (probably under the passenger seat). The computer can then connect to the head unit over bluetooth or hard-wired for audio out. It will be "worse" than Android or CarPlay for most people, but it will mean that I'll have my own portable mini-server that can run any software I want and can use standard off-the-shelf PC accessories. Want a dashcam? It's a $10 webcam and a few shell scripts. Want to run the dashcam output through OpenCV to extract license plate numbers, filter out the German license plates, and automatically upload the results tagged by datetime and location to an online searchable database? God I fucking hate krauts. That requires a bit of coding, but it's possible too. Anyway, you get the idea. With a "full fat" computer in the car, it becomes possible to do things that wouldn't be easy with a locked down Android gadget, and when it's time to upgrade or if parts break, they're also individually replaceable with commercially available components too.
I've been looking into this myself. The conclusion I came to is that it's best to just keep my normal "dumb" non-touchscreen head unit for driving speakers and receiving radio and bluetooth. For the "smart" part, I idea is to mount an AliExpress touchscreen monitor somewhere and connect it to an Alder Lake mini-pc (probably under the passenger seat). The computer can then connect to the head unit over bluetooth or hard-wired for audio out. It will be "worse" than Android or CarPlay for most people, but it will mean that I'll have my own portable mini-server that can run any software I want and can use standard off-the-shelf PC accessories. Want a dashcam? It's a $10 webcam and a few shell scripts. Want to run the dashcam output through OpenCV to extract license plate numbers, filter out the German license plates, and automatically upload the results tagged by datetime and location to an online searchable database? God I fucking hate krauts. That requires a bit of coding, but it's possible too. Anyway, you get the idea. With a "full fat" computer in the car, it becomes possible to do things that wouldn't be easy with a locked down Android gadget, and when it's time to upgrade or if parts break, they're also individually replaceable with commercially available components too.
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